The temptation is to take Bergmans masterpiece for granted. It is probably the most famous of all those modern, post-Pirandellian films concerned with themselves as works of art. It also contains one of the most truly erotic sequences on film, demonstrating what can be done on screen with told material. An actress named Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) elects to become silent and is put into the care of... More >

Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann) are the perfect twosome: two houses, two cars, two daughters, two careers. They have the perfect marriage, until one day, they do not. Are we all living in utter confusion? they wonder together; have we missed something important? Bergmans masterful approach to the dissolution is more an exercise in veneer-stripping than outright dissection.... More >

On the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s, New York Citys expansive urban blight proved to be the perfect petri dish for a thriving downtown art scene. Not yet twenty, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a ubiquitous and inspiring presence in a community that included Jim Jarmusch and this films director, Sara Driver. They and other veterans of the scene share recollections of Basquiat. Combining rarely... More >

By the 1960s, at the height of his powers, Trnka turned his attention away from fables and fairy tales and toward more pointed allegories and satires. Playfully probing works like Passion and Cybernetic Grandma (a surrealist look at a space-age future) are arguably the short-form, animated precursors to the Czech New Wave features that would follow a few years later. But Trnkas 1965 masterwork... More >

Featuring George Takei and many others who were incarcerated, as well as newly rediscovered photographs of Dorothea Lange, this film brings history into the present, retelling this difficult story and following Japanese American activists as they speak out against the Muslim registry and travel ban. Knowing our history is the first step to ensuring we do not repeat it.

Mochida Family by Dorothea Lange

By the 1960s, at the height of his powers, Trnka turned his attention away from fables and fairy tales and toward more pointed allegories and satires. Playfully probing works like Passion and Cybernetic Grandma (a surrealist look at a space-age future) are arguably the short-form, animated precursors to the Czech New Wave features that would follow a few years later. But Trnkas 1965 masterwork... More >

Art imitates life in this quietly devastating masterpiece from Hong Sangsoo. Kim Minhee (The Handmaiden, Claire's Camera)in the role that won her the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlinplays Younghee, an actress reeling in the aftermath of an affair with a married film director. Younghee visits Hamburg then returns to Korea, but as she meets with friends and has her fair share to drink,... More >

Attendance restrictions: Must have a UCB student ID for entrance.

Movies at Moffitt

Set a tiny step into the future, the film has the inevitability of a common dream. . . . One of Bergmans greatest films, [and] one of the least known (Pauline Kael). Fleeing a civil war in their country, a couple (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann), both musicians, retreat to a remote island to grow fruit and cultivate their mutual love. But war overtakes them, exacting its total surrender of... More >

Langs futuristic superproduction is an anxiety dream of urban dystopia expressed as science fiction. Set in the year 2026, Metropolis envisions a repressive techno-oligarchy in which soaring Art Deco towers and overhead freeways mock an underclass of techno slaves ruled by a supertrustee (Alfred Abel), who lives with his collaborators in the paradisiacal nightclub of Yoshiwara. Lang even... More >

After the December 8 screening, enjoy a Film to Table dinner at Babette, the cafe at BAMPFA. Join an intimate group of fellow filmgoers for a four-course, prix-fixe meal in a convivial, dinner-party atmosphere. Purchase dinner tickets in advance at babettecafe.com (film tickets must be purchased separately).

One thing I dislike more than being taken too lightly is being taken too seriously,... More >

Bergmans second color film is one of his most economicalspare, straightforward, but in no sense lightweight. Four people have escaped to a remote island off the Swedish mainland but find that they cannot escape the injustice, violence, and guilt of modern life. An intricate four-way relationship among Max von Sydow, Erland Josephson, Bibi Andersson, and Liv Ullmann is played out against a... More >

Shakespeares romantic fantasia meets its imaginative match in Trnkas bejeweled stop-motion adaptation. Here, the filmmaker trades in his traditional wood sculptures to work with a smooth, pale plastic material that adds just the right level of otherworldly, delicate beauty. With figurines so refined they seem carved out of dreams (his Titania and Puck are especially wondrous), and several... More >

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released in 1920, probably remains the ultimate expression of narrative through set design; even the exquisitely chiseled face of Conrad Veidt seems cut to reflect the angled shadows and interiors through which he somnambulistically slips, under the control of the evil Caligari. The films tableau-like backgrounds emerged from the Sturm expressionist group, which... More >

Featuring an impressive cast of art world characters, including artists Jeff Koons, Larry Poons, Gerhard Richter, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby as well as curators, critics, collectors, and dealers, The Price of Everything is a lively exploration of the uneasy but inextricable relationship between art and money. While the history of collecting art is not new, auctioning work by living artists has... More >

In sixteenth-century Japan, with the pandemonium of civil wars a looming presence in their lives, the potter Genjuro and his wife long to be rich and safe, respectively. But artistic vanity draws Genjuro into the paradisiacal realm of a phantom enchantress. In a parallel tale, Genjuros brother-in-law Tobei, out for military glory, achieves a generals rank for his fraudulent exploitsanother... More >

Marriage and infidelity have rarely been treated as intelligently as in Liv Ullmanns masterful adaptation of a screenplay by none other than Ingmar Bergman, her ex-director and, intriguingly, her ex-lover. Framed within the reminiscences of an elderly man (Erland Josephson), Faithless tracks the adulterous romance between a conductors wife and a narcissistic filmmaker. Tracking how love... More >

Ten years after neorealisms waning came Ermanno Olmi, with his deceptively simple style of observation. In Il posto, an ingenuous lad just out of school is stuffed into a suit, shoved out of his suburban home, and pointed toward Milan in search of un posto sicuro: a steady job. We follow Domenicos progress through the dehumanizing labyrinth of the corporate world; along the way he finds and... More >

A young, shut-away Chinese emperor becomes enraptured by a nightingales songand then by its mechanical reproductionin Trnkas magical adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. A baroque music box brought to life, The Emperors Nightingale is stop-motion at its most lavish, featuring some of Trnkas greatest designs: refined porcelain figurines bedecked in ornate costumes, a court... More >

A powerful study of that enduring status symbol, the uniform, and a piercing critique of its importance in German society, The Last Laugh is the story of a proud hotel doormans demotion to lavatory attendant and his fall from grace in the eyes of neighbors and relatives who had previously respected him. Working in close collaboration with writer Carl Mayer, cameraman Karl Freund, and actor Emil... More >

In eleventh-century Japan, two children are kidnapped and sold into slavery while their mother, Tamiki, withers away on a distant island, dreaming only of being reunited with them. After many years the son assumes his rightful post as provincial governor and sets about deposing the cruel bailiff who brought tragedy upon his family. As in Greek tragedy, this films distanced determinism vies with... More >

Liv Ullmann gives a devastating performance in Bergmans wrenching portrait of a woman on the brink of collapse. A successful psychiatrist, Ullmanns character seems to have it all: a rewarding career, a (vaguely) loving husband, and even a (somewhat tepid) lover on the side, but nightmares are beginning to seep into her sleep and soon come to dominate her entire life. About this moving study of... More >

Akira Kurosawa made his directorial debut in 1943, during the height of World War II and at a time when you werent allowed to say anything worth saying, as he recalled. Back then everyone was saying that the Japanese-style film should be as simple as possible; I disagreed and decided that, since I couldnt say anything because of the censors, I would make a really movie-like movie.... More >

Trnkas earliest works already demonstrate his craftsmanship and artistry, moving from hand-drawn cartoons to surrealist interventions to the expressive beauty of his stop-motion beginnings. Drawing on ancient fables (Grandpa Planted a Beet; The Animals and the Brigands), a Chekhov story (Romance with Double Bass), and even a World War IIera, anti-Nazi urban legend (Springman and the SS), these... More >

Winner of the Palme dOr at Cannes, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is the epic made personal, a cinema of majesty constructed from minutiae. Set in northern Italy in the early 1900s, the film follows three families of farmers and their interactions with their community, their wealthy landlord, and the land itself. Sprawling, politicized peasant epics (Bertoluccis 1900, the Tavianis Padre, Padrone)... More >

Featuring an impressive cast of art world characters, including artists Jeff Koons, Larry Poons, Gerhard Richter, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby as well as curators, critics, collectors, and dealers, The Price of Everything is a lively exploration of the uneasy but inextricable relationship between art and money. While the history of collecting art is not new, auctioning work by living artists has... More >

Bergmans dreamlike family chronicle is set in turn-of-the-century Sweden, where the members of an upper-middle-class theatrical clan are sheltered by their own theatrics from the deepening chaos of the outside world. Bergman has the grace in this most graceful film not to view their histrionics and eccentricities as neuroses. One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through... More >

Its winter in a small mountain town in Czechoslovakia, and time for the Firemens Ball, an annual comedy of errors to which the firemen, mostly elderly, look forward with delight, especially at the prospect of the inevitable beauty-queen contest. Raymond Durgnat writes, Before Milos Forman turned his beady, quizzical eye on the follies and frailties of the American scene, he had trained it on... More >

After the December 8 screening, enjoy a Film to Table dinner at Babette, the cafe at BAMPFA. Join an intimate group of fellow filmgoers for a four-course, prix-fixe meal in a convivial, dinner-party atmosphere. Purchase dinner tickets in advance at babettecafe.com (film tickets must be purchased separately).

One thing I dislike more than being taken too lightly is being taken too seriously,... More >

On the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s, New York Citys expansive urban blight proved to be the perfect petri dish for a thriving downtown art scene. Not yet twenty, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a ubiquitous and inspiring presence in a community that included Jim Jarmusch and this films director, Sara Driver. They and other veterans of the scene share recollections of Basquiat. Combining rarely... More >

Its winter in a small mountain town in Czechoslovakia, and time for the Firemens Ball, an annual comedy of errors to which the firemen, mostly elderly, look forward with delight, especially at the prospect of the inevitable beauty-queen contest. Raymond Durgnat writes, Before Milos Forman turned his beady, quizzical eye on the follies and frailties of the American scene, he had trained it on... More >

Featuring an impressive cast of art world characters, including artists Jeff Koons, Larry Poons, Gerhard Richter, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby as well as curators, critics, collectors, and dealers, The Price of Everything is a lively exploration of the uneasy but inextricable relationship between art and money. While the history of collecting art is not new, auctioning work by living artists has... More >

In a masterpiece of set design and art decoration, director Edmund Goulding creates an atmosphere at once intensely realistic and allegorical. The claustrophobic picture of European grandeur in its last, pre-fascist gasps is enhanced by the ensemble cast: Greta Garbo as a world-weary prima donna; Joan Crawford as a sensuous stenographer with an eye on Wallace Beerys pocketbook; Lionel Barrymore... More >

Bergmans dreamlike family chronicle is set in turn-of-the-century Sweden, where the members of an upper-middle-class theatrical clan are sheltered by their own theatrics from the deepening chaos of the outside world. Bergman has the grace in this most graceful film not to view their histrionics and eccentricities as neuroses. One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through... More >

After the December 8 screening, enjoy a Film to Table dinner at Babette, the cafe at BAMPFA. Join an intimate group of fellow filmgoers for a four-course, prix-fixe meal in a convivial, dinner-party atmosphere. Purchase dinner tickets in advance at babettecafe.com (film tickets must be purchased separately).

One thing I dislike more than being taken too lightly is being taken too seriously,... More >

Charlie Chaplin said that The Gold Rush was the film for which he would like to be remembered; it glitters with some of his most memorable nuggets of comedy. In the frozen wastes of the Klondike, where hordes endure hardship in the quest for gold, Chaplin's hapless Lone Prospector takes shelter in the cabin of a hungry giant, who hallucinates Charlie into a startlingly convincing chicken. In... More >

The radiant Setsuko Hara is a happily single young woman who, in the eyes of her traditional family, cant be happy at all until shes married. Unbeknownst to them, however, she has her eyes set on someone, a widower with a young child. About Early Summer, Ozu stated, "I was interested in getting much deeper than just the story itself; I wanted to depict the cycles of life, the transience of... More >

Black-and-white cinematography was redefined in Murnaus Faust: this is a film shot in darkness and light. Lotte Eisners elegiac description sets the mood for Murnaus version of the legend, starring Emil Jannings as the subtly mischievous Mephistopheles, and Swedish actor Gösta Ekman as a subtly homoerotic Faust: This film starts with the most remarkable and poignant images the German... More >

Ever the nostalgic fabulist, Hayao Miyazaki builds a passage between modern, everyday Japanese life and the half-remembered realms of spirits and folklore in this compelling adventure, winner of numerous international prizes including the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. En route to their new suburban home, ten-year-old Chihiro and her parents stumble upon an abandoned theme park that turns out... More >

Ten years after neorealisms waning came Ermanno Olmi, with his deceptively simple style of observation. In Il posto, an ingenuous lad just out of school is stuffed into a suit, shoved out of his suburban home, and pointed toward Milan in search of un posto sicuro: a steady job. We follow Domenicos progress through the dehumanizing labyrinth of the corporate world; along the way he finds and... More >

Masahiro Shinodas first film for Japans avant-garde Art Theatre Guild, Double Suicide strikingly reinterprets Monzaemon Chikamatsus famed 1720 bunraku puppet play involving the doomed love between a married paper-shop owner and a courtesan; here, its not just the play that is presented, but the entire presentation of the play. We begin with the kurogo (men dressed in black who traditionally... More >

Langs extravagant The Spiders shares affinities with other serials of its day, notably those made by Louis Feuillade in France and by Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie in the US. Lang also drew inspiration from sensational newspaper items and contemporary pulp fiction. The story begins in a high-society club in San Francisco where Kay Hoog, an American sportsman, tells of a message he found... More >

This second installment of The Spiders continues the characters continent-crossing pursuit of a diamond-shaped head of Buddha that is supposed to make the woman who wears it ruler of Asia. Lang indulges in the exotic and creates mysterious, labyrinthine architectural sets, with caves, underground chambers, and vaults serving The Spiders as clandestine meeting places.

The temptation is to take Bergmans masterpiece for granted. It is probably the most famous of all those modern, post-Pirandellian films concerned with themselves as works of art. It also contains one of the most truly erotic sequences on film, demonstrating what can be done on screen with told material. An actress named Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) elects to become silent and is put into the care of... More >